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Those who have achieved long-term success in blogging will tell you that it didn’t happen overnight. Being a successful blogger or writer is not about doing it for long enough, but it’s about winning the battle against yourself. One of the biggest battles every writer encounters is procrastination.
When you find yourself being distracted by the littlest thing, it stops you from doing something you really want to do. Next thing you know, it’s the end of the day and you’re nowhere near meeting your goal. We all get distracted from time to time. These tips will help you beat distraction and keep it from becoming procrastination.
Change Your Location
If you struggle to focus when surrounded by the same four walls, a change of scenery can do wonders. If you work from home, sometimes those everyday problems become a reason to not do anything else. Maybe you think you need to take care of these things before you can sit down and focus.
But you don’t have to leave your house. All you need is to find somewhere quiet and set yourself a word count or a time limit. If you’re still struggling, then check to see if any of those home problems are contributing. For example, if problems with your utilities are keeping you from feeling comfortable and productive, you can contact a 24 hour AC service specialist or electrician.
Home repairs should be resolved, but you don’t have to check everything off that to-do list before you can start writing.
Try a Different Method of Writing
Maybe your struggle is you think that you just need to sit down and start typing. But that blank page, with all its possibilities and no hints, is intimidating. So you turn to the internet for inspiration… and procrastination. It might be easier to get started if you had some kind of structure in place.
Some writers find anchors on the page to help keep them going. If you don’t know what you’re going to write about, this might mean you need to observe more.
You might also change how you approach writing. Start your writing session with time blocked out for research. Try dictation software to reel off your thoughts and tidy them up later. In your drafting stages, you need to get it right; you need to get it written!
Deadlines are the Enemy of Procrastination
Faced with a deadline, many of us will get all our procrastination out of the way early before buckling down to meet that deadline. The more you practice with deadlines, the better you’ll get at just getting straight to work when you need to.
But we writers tend to take liberties with the idea. If you struggle with a big deadline, especially if it’s a few days away, try a smaller one. Set the timer for 30 minutes and then write as quickly as you can without any research, purely to hit a word count.
The thing to remember is that when we are struggling to write, we need to dive in. If in doubt, stop thinking.
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